BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has duties. They said it so often and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it. One hears it now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother. If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. ( Oscar Wilde)

Owns nothing. No credit card. no mortgage. no car. debt free. ''"I feel no need for food and water," states Prahladbhai Jani, a seventy-six year old Indian ascetic who lives in a cave near the Ambaji temple in the state of Gujarat. Mr. Jani claims that he has not had food or fluids to drink for the last sixty-five years. At the age of seven years he left home in search of spiritual unfoldment. Jani states that at the age of eleven years he was blessed by a goddess. He claims that since that blessing he has gained his sustenance from nectar that filters down through a hole in his palate, and has not passed urine or stools since then. Mr. Jani explained, "I get the elixir of life from the hole in my palate, which enables me to go without food and water." Almost daily Mr. Jani enters a state of Samadhi characterized by extreme bliss and enormous light and strength. He says that he has never experienced medical problems. He says that he did not speak for a period of forty-five years.''

You can’t take it with you. Maybe charity does begin at home. Are Billionaires going Pinko? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have always seemed to hold a pretty strong hand at bridge. The deck may be stacked and they own the house but it may be a privilege and form of entitlement. “Bridge is such a sensational game that I wouldn’t mind being in jail if I had three cellmates who were decent players and who were willing to keep the game going 24 hours a day” (Warren Buffett, Investor and active tournament player) This, the world’s most famous pro-villains put some startling cards on the table by pledging to give their wealth away. Maybe their crystal ball is emitting some dour predictions at unusual frequencies. Or, it may have been a Minsky Moment.

The phrase “Minsky moment”  is named after Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), an economist known as a rather pessimistic contrarian during his lifetime for arguing that markets are inherently unstable and long stretches of good times just end in bigger collapses.The Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart  has a pretty good explanation. At its core, the Minsky view was straightforward:

''Every financial bubble begins with a disturbance. It could be the invention of a new technology, such as the Internet. It may be a shift in laws or economic policy. The creation of ERISA or unexpected reductions of interest rates are examples. No matter what the cause, the outlook changes for one sector of the economy.''

When times are good, investors take on risk; the longer times stay good, the more risk they take on, until they’ve taken on too much. Eventually, they reach a point where the cash generated by their assets no longer is sufficient to pay off the mountains of debt they took on to acquire them. Losses on such speculative assets prompt lenders to call in their loans. “This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values,” Mr. Minsky wrote. When investors are forced to sell even their less-speculative positions to make good on their loans, markets spiral lower and create a severe demand for cash,that can force central bankers to lend a hand. At that point, the Minsky moment has arrived. Are Mutt and Jeff jumping ship or following in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie?

''Research studies by Dr Christopher Shaw of Carlinville Illinois showed that students who learn to bid and play bridge score better on standard Iowa tests''...

Carnegie, an American possessed of nineteenth century grandeur, was a man of contradictions. The wealthiest human being of his time, he was convinced of the merits of poverty in developing character. His vast wealth, produced by the sweat of “the toilers of Pittsburgh,” he returned to the city he loved, to America, to Scotland, to England and to the world. Not a religionist, he yet spoke in spiritual terms when expressing what he hoped his benefactions would accomplish in the world and in the lives of those very toilers whose labor had produced his wealth:

''The statue of "Labor," also known as "The Reading Blacksmith," is one element in a monument memorializing Pittsburgh industrialist Col. James Anderson (1785-1861). It is the work of Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), sculptor of the statue of Abraham Lincoln enshrined in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C. The monument was the gift of Andrew Carnegie to the people of the city of Allegheny (now the North Side of Pittsburgh) in honor of a man whom Carnegie viewed as his benefactor. In the words of the monument, Col. Anderson is praised as "founder of free libraries in western Pennsylvania." It goes on to sing that Anderson "opened his library to working boys and on Saturday afternoons acted as librarian, thus dedicating not only his books, but himself, to the noble work."

“Man does not live by bread alone.” I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth. ” ( Andrew Carnegie )

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Citizen Kane. Orson Welles. 1941

The Gypsy must have got into their soul. Its Bohemia at Berkshire. Investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft  founder Bill Gates announced on Wednesday that they are asking hundreds of billionaire Americans to give away at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity. The list of billionaires is approximately 400 in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine. Buffett, who made his fortune with insurance and investment company Berkshire Hathaway Inc , Gates and his wife, Melinda, have held a series of dinners with a couple dozen super- wealthy- blue- blood -old- money  Americans in the past year to urge them to make a philanthropic pledge. They have named the campaign, the highly imaginative, ” Giving Pledge” and are asking those who commit to giving away at least half their fortune during their lifetime or after their death to publicly state their intention with a letter explaining their decision.

media.cnbc.com:''Warren Buffett rocks out in a music video featuring GEICO associates singing a guitar ballad about the insurer's "outstanding" customer service. The professionally-produced video, posted by the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary on YouTube, was shown at the annual employees meeting last month. It's now part of the company's Social Media marketing efforts. It features Buffett, dressed to resemble Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, singing, "You bring out the best in me, you can always turn to me."

”Patty Stonesifer, a former chief executive of the Gates Foundation and now adviser to Gates and Buffett, said that four families had agreed to announce their pledge on Wednesday — real estate and construction billionaire Eli Broad, venture capitalist John Doerr, media entrepreneur Gerry Lenfest and former Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) Chairman John Morgridge.Broad and his wife Edythe said in a statement that they will pledge to give away 75 percent of their wealth during and after their lifetime. Forbes has estimated Broad to be worth $5.7 billion. ”We agree with Andrew Carnegie’s wisdom that ‘The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,’ and we also believe ‘he who gives while he lives also knows where it goes,’” the couple said. “Philanthropy is unbelievably rewarding.”

from Richard Metzger: ''But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.'' www.dangerousminds.com

In a letter posted on the campaign’s website, www.givingpledge.org, Buffett said he “couldn’t be happier” with his 2006 decision to give away 99 percent of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and family charities. ”Now, Bill and Melinda Gates and I are asking hundreds of rich Americans to pledge at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity,” Buffett, 79, said.” ( reuters )

Its difficult to determine their actions; they are not advocating anything radical such as a dismantling of capital markets, but rather reinforcing the existing system with an implied advocacy of the ”poverty industry” where money is filtered down through administrative expenses leaving a substantially less portion for the recipients, and fostering dependencies on this aid. As advanced societies enter more fully into this transformational period, the information age, it is likely that unemployment will rise significantly and in all likelihood Buffett and Gates are aware, or they have someone to tell them.

Peter Sellers & Britt Eklund from ''Sugar and Spice''

”Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins. There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair. ( Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism )

”Although a Captain of Industry, he was peculiarly naive or perhaps just eternally optimistic about human nature–sharing with old Walt Whitman an abiding democratic faith in the common sense, decency and nobility of spirit of the people. Andrew Carnegie lived through the industrialization of America and was one of the leading actors in that drama. He was a shrewd and alert businessman who could charm Mark Twain with his adage, “Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.”  He was also a millionaire with an extraordinary social conscience. “The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced,”  he so wrote and so believed.

Bill gates and Jack Nicklaus .popeofslope.com ''Recently at a charity golf tournament near Seattle, the Microsoft mogul posted two more unreal numbers: He shot an 87 with a 30-handicap to finish low net winner. "That's statistically inipossible," maintains Dean Knuth of the U.S. Golf Association. "A 30 cannot shoot an 87. He cannot." As a warning for all the fudgers, gonifs, and sandbaggers out there with silicone scorecards, Knuth laid out the odds on your terrific scores actually jibing with your handicaps: The odds are 1 in 200 that you'll beat your handicap by three strokes. Beat it by five strokes, it's 1 in 570. The odds for going 10 under are 1 in 82,000. For Gates' score, Knuth is talking 1 in 1,000,000, and the rest of us are shouting fraud. "Bill did not know his handicap," Knuth offers. "They gave him a nurnber, or he said it. Statistically, he's probably a 19." And just what did Mr. $18 Billion win? When the dust settled on the Richard Karn's Seattle Star Days golf event at Willows Run, the triumphant Gates had won a box of balls, a big-screen TV, a set of Wayne-Dalton garage doors and ah, gee, some computer software. Next time Bill Gates tells you about his 30-handicap, tell him to reprogram his computer.''

However, not everyone is entirely convinced about Gates and Buffett’s initiative: ”Thats great—-after defrauding investors, sending jobs overseas, and basically doing their part to destroy the U.S. economy, thet now get to make it right by all of the lemmings by giving the money they obtained by destroying other peoples lives away. I guess Mr. Bill Gates will give all his money to India, since he was so fond of outsourcing all American computer systems analysts/programmer jobs to India. Mr. Warren will probably do the same, since most of the companies he purchased immediately outsourced to China, etc. Amazing that people fall for this display of “generosity”—-people have the attention span of knat—knife me in the back today and I am mad, do something nice tommorrow and all is forgotten.

Amazing people are so gullible. While I realize that the media glamorizes Bill Gates and Warrent Buffet, those of us who have watched their cruelty towards their fellow Americans over the years know better….watch—most of the money will go outside of the U.S. to benefit their ego, not other people—-just watch!” ( letter to Forbes Magazine )…

Mao said, “Let 100 flowers bloom”, then killed maybe 70 million Chinese people. Words are not actions. Show me the ACTIONS of Gates and Buffett. Read the LATimes stories from Jan.7,07 about the disease and destruction caused in Africa as a result of Gates’ “giving”. He’s been telling this “I’m so generous!” lie for several years now, but there is NO evidence of him helping anyone.
Where are the voices and comments of those who say, “Thank you, Bill?” Where?
Don’t be so GULLIBLE! This is nothing but another scheme to stay richer than everyone else. ( Letter to Forbes Magazine )